THE FOUNDING Conference of the Fourth International took place forty years ago this month. CHARLIE VAN GELDEREN was there and describes the experience.
The Founding Conference of the Fourth International is usually described as having taken place 'somewhere in Switzerland'. This was for security reasons. In actual fact, our International was formally launched in a small room near the Gare du Nord in Paris towards the end of August 1938.
I was privileged to be among those — no more than forty people — who attended this historic gathering, representing the Fourth International Organisation of South Africa (FIOSA). As this organisation was not formally affiliated to the International Communist League, I was seated as an observer and not as a delegate.
The founding of the Fourth International took place under vastly different conditions from those in which its three predecessors were launched.
CHRYSALIS
When Marx and Engels founded the First International, the working class in the advanced capitalist states was emerging from its chrysalis and beginning to assert itself as an independent political force challenging the hegemony of the capitalist class.
Trade unions and working class parties were springing up everywhere and Marxist theory was beginning to penetrate its ranks, giving direction and historical perspective to what had hitherto been only economic aspirations of the new class.
The Second International was built on the foundations of the mass social-democratic parties which had sprung up in Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and other countries. Formally it was based on an acceptance of Marxist theory, but the insidious poison of reformism was already seeping into its veins, leading to the ultimate betrayal in August 1914.
The Third (Communist) International was called into being by Lenin and Trotsky in the wake of the first victorious proletarian revolution — the Russian October — on the crest of a rising revolutionary wave.
All these three Internationals reflected the growing strength and self-confidence of the working class.
The Fourth International, in stark contrast, was born in the trough of world reaction. In the first workers state, the Soviet Union, Stalinism had decimated the Bolshevik Party, its leaders murdered in the frame-up Moscow Trials.
Leon Trotsky, the outstanding leader of the October Revolution after Lenin, was in exile in Mexico. Stalin's Five Year Plans were accompanied by a monstrous lowering of the living standards and suppression of the rights of the working masses; the Soviets existed only in name.
In Spain, fascism had unleashed a civil war that was to end in tragedy and defeat. Japan had embarked on its invasion of Manchuria. The great mass movement in France (June 1936) which brought the Popular Front government of Leon Blum to office was betrayed by the Stalinist and reformist leaderships.
Above all, in Germany, Hitler's Nazis had destroyed the most powerful working class movement in the capitalist world. All seemed doom and foreboding!
But there was no despondency among the handful of people who met in Paris that August of 1938. They saw themselves as the continuators of the movement which had begun with Marx and Engels, the carriers of history, the vanguard of the future.
Absent in distant Mexico, but dominating the conference, was Leon Trotsky. With literally only a handful of followers, he had set himself the task of carrying forward the Bolshevik heritage, despite the efforts of the ruling class, the Stalinists, and the reformists to stop him.
And what blows he suffered! The physical destruction of his family and the group of comrades in the Soviet Union he had done so much to bring into being; the murder of his closest companions in exile, Erwin Wolfe, Rudolf Klement, Ignace Reiss — to mention only some of the many who fell victim to Stalin's murder squads, determined to strangle the infant new International in its womb.
This, then, was the atmosphere in which we met. But the mood, as I have already stated, was one of optimism. For we believed firmly that ours was the future.
Some of the participants have not stayed the course. A recital of names would be pointless. The enduring nature of their work has outlived them for today, forty years later, the Fourth International is the only internationally organised body of revolutionaries, growing in strength despite setbacks and still as confident in the future of humanity as the founders of 1938.
HEROIC
That first conference discussed many issues. First there was the salute to our living martyrs and heroic dead; greetings to the anti-fascist fighters in Spain and to Leon Trotsky.
Of course the conference dealt with the current issues which confronted the working class in those days — the war in the Far East; the role of American imperialism; the tasks of the French section; the perennial problem of trying to heal the splits among British Trotskyists.
We discussed the Canadian, Greek and Mexican sections and the problems which confronted them; the organisation for the defence and relief of persecuted revolutionaries; and a resolution on youth which called for the formation of a Youth International.
(The Founding Conference of the new Youth International took place a few days later and I was elected, as British representative, on the first executive. Alas, it was short-lived owing to the imminence of war.)
The coming imperialist war — only twelve months ahead — played a large part in the discussion, but the main task of the conference was to discuss and ratify the Transitional Programme (later published as The Death Agony of Capitalism).
For us in the Fourth International, the importance of the Transitional Programme has been fundamental. It set out to answer the crucial questions: 'How can humanity be extricated from the nightmare of crises, of world wars, of continuous chaos in which it has been floundering for some forty years. How can the transition to socialism be assured?' (Pierre Frank, The Fourth International).
The idea of a transitional programme had been raised at the Third Congress of the Communist International — a programme which would organise the workers in the struggle for power combined with a programme to be put into operation immediately after the workers took power. This was in contrast to the old minimum and maximum programmes of the Second International.
The Transitional Programme therefore emphasised the continuity of the Fourth International with the first four congresses of Lenin's Comintern.
The importance of the Transitional Programme is not in the actual demands it contains, though many of them are still very relevant today. It must, of course, be adapted to the needs of the 1970s and not 1938.
What is important is the method of the Transitional Programme, the need for a programme which combines a series of slogans for democratic and transitional demands corresponding to the needs of the masses and to the logic of the development of the class struggle.
ADAPTED
It culminates in the call for a workers government, which is not synonymous with the dictatorship of the proletariat but is a transitional-government formulation 'which has to be adapted to the masses' organisational situation and degree of class consciousness at a given moment. A programme lacking any perspective for a workers government taking anti-capitalist measures is not a transitional programme' [ibid].
The Transitional Programme is the foundation on which the Fourth International, 'The World Party of the Socialist Revolution', is built.
Looking back to that conference in 1938, the one thing that strikes me as significant is that I cannot recall any woman delegate being present. Also, apart from the passages in the Transitional Programme, the issue of women's oppression was not even on the agenda.
That is something which cannot happen today in our International, and we are all deeply in debt to our women comrades who through their struggles have raised our consciousness on this issue and started the process — alas, by no means complete — of educating the men comrades out of their machismo.
In 1938, too, we did not even think of homosexuals as an oppressed minority. Here, too, we have been educated in struggle.
Apart from myself, there were no representatives from the imperialist colonies. The only black delegate present was CLR James who, though born in Trinidad, represented the British section.
Today, forty years on, the capitalist world is in mortal crisis. Stalinism, a seemingly indestructible monolith in 1938, is riven with contradictions. The Stalinist theory of 'socialism in one country' has proved, as Trotsky predicted, to be a deadly poison which saps the very fibre of the socialist revolution.
History has demonstrated only too tragically that the Trotskyist struggle against this theory was no mere academic exercise. As a direct result of this Stalinist theory we see states where the workers have conquered power, the USSR, China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, etc., at each other's throats instead of combining to finally crush the imperialist enemy.
Similarly, Stalin's theory of the unilinear development of the revolution through the successive stages of bourgeois-democratic to the socialist phase, in contrast to Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, has distorted the revolution in the 'underdeveloped' countries of Africa, Asia and South America into hideous caricature-reflections of the deformed revolution in the Soviet Union itself.
Everywhere Stalinism, whether in its Muscovite or Maoist form, has become a brake on the advance of the world revolution, a counter-revolutionary force which must be destroyed and replaced by the communist internationalism which is the sure foundation on which the Fourth International was founded.
Amidst all this tragic chaos, the red flag of the Fourth International flies bravely, proudly proclaiming its internationalism and the same firm faith in humanity's future which inspired that small gathering in 1938.